So, tomorrow I'm heading about an hour and a half away to visit with cousins I haven't seen in years - they don't LIVE an hour and a half away, they are visiting their mother, who does. Too complicated to explain. We are not a close, fuzzy, "gotta be together" bunch. My theory on this is that this may be because our parents' generation drove each other batshit crazy with togetherness, and we, the next generation, had a sort of unspoken agreement that we didn't want that - as we grew up most of us scattered far away - though I do think the one who has been teaching in various parts of the former Soviet Union gets the gold star for bolting the homestead. I went to California, back to DC briefly, to Florida, to NC, and back to FL again. Two cousins stayed put. Another moved to FL years after I did, and we have busy lives so we rarely see each other. We all get along fine, better than fine, we all like each other and have fun when we see each other. We see each other once a decade or so, email more often (but not that much more often) it's a treat when we get together once in a blue moon, and then we get about our own lives. We have little in common besides genetic material, we are family, but after we catch up on what we're doing, our lives have very little in common. I think this is true of a lot of family gatherings, we are just more realistic about it, so we don't "feel guilty" when we don't see each other often.

My kids have met only some of this branch of the family. (That's how close we are.) Girlchild will drive down from Tally, Boychild will drive up from Orlando but separately, since he's taking off after the visit to return to Orlando to help a friend retrieve a newly-purchased-old-car somewhere down near Tampa (don't ask, your head will hurt - mine did) after the family gathering. So a caravan of three vehicles will descend on my cousin's from two different directions, then two vehicles (Girlchild and I) will head back to my house in the evening. It is NOT going to be a restful weekend, and the yard will not get touched. If I'm lucky, I'll move enough furniture to make room for the tree early next week.

It's snowing elsewhere, but we are not left out of the winter stuff. It's going to get damn cold tomorrow, and it's always even colder at my cousin's house North of here. And do I have a nice warm sweater coat? No I do not.